118
the ballast-covered paths and sweaty lawns,
where the water sprinkler fires away in series.
Distances grow. The newcomer tells his neighbor,
"But everything turned out well in the end-"
and tries hard to believe what he is saying.
PARTISAN REVIEW
w.
S. Merwin:
Thank you, Tomas. I want to say thank you too for the
chance to be here, to say some things about and to Czeslaw, and to thank
everybody who's responsible for making that possible.
It
was well over forty years ago that I first read some poems by
Czeslaw Milosz and they stayed in my mind. Later I found them again in
his
Anthology of Postwar Polish Poctry,
a book that was important to me then
and has been ever since. I think with thanks of the great voices that I first
heard then that were to go on resounding in my private pantheon, but
before that anthology had been published I'd incurred another debt to
Milosz.
In
London in the fifties, during what was clearly a time of transi–
tion in my own life and writing,
J
period of examination and reassessment
of what I thought it was about and what I was doing and why, I opened
a book by Milosz that I had bought in the States.
It
was
Thc Captivc Mind,
a book that seemed to speak directly to my concerns about the relation of
poetry to history and the experience of history.
In
the fifties [ was call–
ing into question, among other things, many assumptions about poetry
and purpose, the conventions of poetry, the sense of it, and in the mean–
time hardly writing at all, wondering when I would write again, knowing
that when [ did it would have
to
be different in some unforeseeable way
from what I had written until then. So it was a singularly raw and recep–
tive moment full of the awareness of the passing of youth.
Thc Captivc
Mind
lit up for me like a landscape under incendiary bombardment. The
passage I refer
to
in particular began this way-I'm quoting parts and leav–
ing out others:
The Eastern intellectual ... is a severe critic. ... he does not want cheap
consolation which will eventually prove all the more depressing. The war
has left him suspicious and highly skilled in unll1asking shall1 and
pretense....The work of human thought
s/lOlIld
stand the test of bru–
tal, naked reali ty... .Probably only those things are worthwhile which can
preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.
The following part remained almost word for word in my head:
